The History of “Loving” to Read

As a senior in college, I took a class on Jane Austen—a great class with, it must be said, a weird vibe. Almost all of the students were women (out of around a hundred people, only five or ten were men), and it was a hothouse of Jane Austen obsession. In the first lecture, the professor identified herself as a Janeite—a member of “the curious American cult of Jane Austen,” according to the BBC—and, when she asked if we were Janeites, too, scores of people raised their hands. The class, she reassured us, wouldn’t be wasted on Austen fanatics. Even if you’d read “Pride and Prejudice” a dozen times (starting, presumably, at the age of ten), there still was room to grow, if not in devotion then in discernment. Knowledge could complement ardor, sense enrich sensibility. Even “Clueless” might reveal layers of sophistication.

At the time, I found this off-putting. But—as Austen could tell you—first impressions are often simplistic. Soon enough, I learned that all sorts of people are obsessed with Austen. (The philosopher Gilbert Ryle, asked if he read novels, replied, “Yes—all six, every year.”) I also discovered that almost every truly famous writer has his or her own cult of personality. Austen’s cult has been rivalled by the cults of Dickens, Tolstoy, Eliot, Joyce, Hemingway, Lawrence, and Fitzgerald, among others. Today, readers worship Karl Ove Knausgaard or Elena Ferrante. Janeites may be the Trekkies of the literary world, but their passion is really just a more intensified version of ordinary bookishness.

If anything, the fervor of the Janeites puts into relief a fact almost too obvious to notice: the world of books is a romantic world. Romance structures literary life, and to be a reader is, often, to follow its choreography, from susceptibility and discovery (“I just saw it there in the bookstore!”) to infatuation, intimacy, identification, and obsession. We connect with books in an intellectual way, but the most valuable relationships we have with them are emotional; to say that you merely admire or respect a book is, on some level, to insult it. Feelings are so fundamental to literary life that it can be hard to imagine a way of relating to literature that doesn’t involve loving it. Without all those emotions, what would reading be?

In “Loving Literature: A Cultural History,” Deidre Shauna Lynch, a professor of English at Harvard, shows us that it wasn’t always this way. For a long time, people didn’t love literature. They read with their heads, not their hearts (or at least they thought they did), and they were unnerved by the idea of readers becoming emotionally attached to books and writers. It was only over time, Lynch writes—over the century roughly between 1750 and 1850—that reading became a “private and passional” activity, as opposed to a “rational, civic-minded” one.

To grasp this “rational” approach to reading, Lynch asks you to transport yourself back to a time when, in place of today’s literary culture, what scholars call “rhetorical" culture reigned. In the mid-seventeen-hundreds, a typical anthology of poetry—for example, “The British Muse,” published in 1738—was more like Bartlett’s “Familiar Quotations” than the Norton Anthology. The poems were organized by topic (“Absence,” “Adversity,” “Adultery”); the point wasn’t to appreciate and cherish them but to harness their eloquence in order to impress people. Today, when you browse BrainyQuote.com, you don’t conceive of yourself as wandering a hallowed storehouse of treasured literary wisdom—you’re just rummaging around, looking for something that sounds good and expresses the right idea. In a rhetorical culture, Lynch writes, “poetry offers itself to readers not as a love object, but rather as a source of instruction in how to speak fair . . . and thus in how to woo love objects and advance in the world.” Basically, it’s all BrainyQuote.

The invention that disrupted this rhetorical world was the canon. “Canon formation,” as literary historians call it, started in the mid-eighteenth century for all kinds of reasons, among them a rising interest in taste and connoisseurship, and, in Britain, a rethinking of copyright law. (In 1774, in Donaldson v. Beckett, British judges rejected the system of perpetual copyright in favor of the “public domain”; one consequence was a new notion that the great, enduring books belonged to all Britons.) The growth of the canon changed how people related to literature. It shifted the temporal focus of literary life from the present to the past; it made reading intrinsically nostalgic.

Some readers read because they want to know about the here and now. But, when a young person’s favorite book is “The Great Gatsby” or “Jane Eyre,” something else is going on. That sort of reader is, as Lynch puts it, “striving to bridge the distance between self and other and now and then.” And, from that sense of striving, a whole set of values flows. In rhetorical culture, the most important writing was au courant, and the “best” readers made use of it to enhance their own eloquence. But in an appreciative, literary age, the most important books are the ones that have outlasted their eras, and the “best” readers are people who are especially susceptible to emanations from other times and places. Being a reader becomes an identity unto itself. A reader is unsatisfied with the present and yearns for something more. She finds it by cultivating intimate relationships with kindred spirits from another time.

How to understand this new culture of readerly yearning—this intrusion of feeling into a cerebral realm? In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the metaphors of enchantment, seduction, and love were ready to hand. Quickly, the vocabularies of romance and reading began to merge. In 1750, Samuel Johnson wrote that a good biography can “enchain the heart by an irresistible interest.” (We still talk this way about books: “There’s a bewitching urgency to the narration that’s impossible to resist,” _Publishers Weekly _wrote, last year, of “The Goldfinch.”) Books began to acquire a devotional aura; they were associated with privacy, feeling, tenderness. They entered into the home’s most private spaces—a child’s room, an adult’s bedside table. At a time when marriage itself was becoming more romantic, a long-term commitment to a novel and its author began to feel like a kind of virtuous loyalty. (“All six, every year.”)

Readers and critics pushed back against this new conception of literature. Because it was organized around personalities, they argued, it was less sensitive to quality. (Besotted readers, Johnson wrote, fail to judge books on their merits; they “like only when they like the author.”) And it wasn’t all sweetness and light. Literary love is intrinsically doomed; the canon, as Lynch puts it, is “a cultural space of posthumousness.” Victorian readers took to visiting the “homes and haunts” of the dead writers they loved. Feeling, Lynch writes, that “literature is never more lovable than when at death’s door,” they proclaimed—as we do—the death of literary reading.

We, of course, are the inheritors of this bittersweet legacy. Reading “Loving Literature,” I couldn’t help but see the romance that Lynch describes everywhere—from my local bookstore, where one can buy a tote bag with the likeness of Virginia Woolf or George Orwell, to the inevitable instances in which dead writers betray their present-day devotees. (“You shouldn’t be too much in love with what you are reading, or you will be disappointed, like always,” the philosopher Peter Trawny said recently of Martin Heidegger.) Last week, I recognized Lynch’s literary love in the care with which I put my books on my new office bookshelf. One might imagine that e-books and the Web could deromanticize reading. But, far from being on the wane, it’s possible that our romantic relationship with literature is bleeding over into other parts of cultural life. The rise of TV and movie fandom, for example—with its generous affection turning, when it’s betrayed, into lavish scorn—seems to be an extension of our love affair with books. It’s a way of loving a canon in the present tense.

Then there’s the case of the English professor. Judging by Lynch’s history, professors are doubly trapped. Their deep love of books isn’t just unrequited; it’s inexpressible. Even when they talk about the writers they love, professors have to keep it professional—which, of course, only reinforces the idea that there’s a divide between loving literature and thinking about it. Lynch’s book shows that loving literature is a performance, the acting-out of a centuries-old metaphor. If that’s true, then its opposite—cool, detached, academic cerebrality—is also a performance. It’s a tough spot. Unable to embrace the cheese and camp of being a book lover, professors find themselves in a camp all their own.

Joshua Rothman is The New Yorker’s archive editor. He is also a frequent contributor to newyorker.com, where he writes about books and ideas.